I picked up Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens’ 1988 book, Memory Prime, because the cover is amazing. I’m a sucker for action-packed book covers, and this particular juxtaposition of Spock’s head and electrical current suggested a compelling combination of mystery and peril.
Memory Prime was the Reeves-Stevenses’ first published collaboration. Atypically for Star Trek novels, Memory Prime treats the novels that came before it as canon. The Reeves-Stevenses refer to Kirk’s extensive landholdings on Centaurus (described in detail in Brad Ferguson’s Crisis on Centaurus!), and allude to Diane Duane’s Ensign Naraht. Their Klingons speak John M. Ford’s Klingonaase. There is plenty of mystery and peril.
The story opens on a strange and distant planet, with a mysterious dealer in kevas and trillium. There’s a romance, and a murder mystery, and a secret order of Romulan ninja assassins, and the space-Nobel prizes, and a labor dispute at an academic institution. The main business of this piece is to follow up on the life of Mira Romaine, Scotty’s love interest from the Original Series episode, “The Lights of Zetar.” Romaine was a young librarian on her first deep-space voyage en route to her first deep-space post at Memory Alpha, the Federation’s most important library.
Scotty’s love life in the Original Series can best be described as unfortunate. In “Wolf in the Fold,” he went out walking with a woman who was stabbed by the ancient space-traveling spirit of Jack the Ripper. He was kind of into that ship’s anthropologist who talked Apollo into killing himself (and who may or may not have then had Apollo’s baby, depending on who you ask) in “Who Mourns for Adonais.” I believe he may have also gotten a woman a cup of coffee once. The Enterprise’s engines are a harsh mistress.
“The Lights of Zetar” was not great Star Trek. Scotty spent the entire episode convincing me that I never want to see him in love again. He neglected the engines to swan around chafing Lt. Romaine’s hand and mooning over her moments of vulnerability. Romaine had many moments of vulnerability, because she was possessed by the disembodied Zetarians, who killed absolutely everyone on Memory Alpha, which had no defensive shields because it was an institution of higher learning and a galactic resource. As a result, Kirk, Spock, and McCoy had a lengthy discussion of Romaine’s adolescent history of psychosomatic illnesses and revealed that she wasn’t psychic, just highly impressionable. Shortly after I died of chauvinism, they arranged a dramatic space-orcism to force the Zetarians out of the lieutenant with the power of atmospheric pressure. And then, since the writer was apparently done throwing darts at a high school science textbook, they decided that the best thing for Romaine was a return to a normal routine and they left her at Memory Alpha. Where we just saw that the entire staff was dead.
I had some unanswered questions. Apparently, so did the Reeves-Stevenses.
How do you rebuild your life when the co-workers you haven’t even met yet are all dead?
The Reeves-Stevenses assure me that Romaine was not left by herself to bury her fallen comrades. Memory Alpha was re-staffed and has since been built anew, as Memory Prime, a newer, bigger space library. Romaine is the ranking Federation officer on this new installation. In addition to maintaining archives and the powerful sentient computers that search the archives to find patterns in data, Memory Prime boasts spacious living quarters for staff, restaurants, an intergalactic conference center, and a regrettable shortage of server time for research on the archives. Defensive systems include shields, a complicated system of internal transporters, and Federation security personnel. The grunt work of academic research is handled by adorable robot research associates, who are only occasionally weaponized. Memory Prime also maintains a live animal research lab full of aggressive monkeys. Clearly, however unfortunate the beginnings of her career, Romaine has risen far. The archivists see her as a tool of the man, and are threatening to strike. Of course.
How do you rekindle lost love after years of separation?
It helps if you and your ex have to deal with a conspiracy to frame Spock for the assassination of his former teacher. The difficulty that you have returning each others’ phone calls can quickly be overcome in the heady excitement of unraveling a devious plot to undermine academic and technological advancements in the Federation. Who would do that? It turns out the Romulan ninja assassins are nihilists. Nihilists with access to aggressive lab monkeys.
Do Scotty and Romaine get back together? I honestly can’t remember. I’m sure the question was addressed, but it sort of got lost in the ending, which involved a Romulan ninja assassin, some weaponized research associates, and a critical containment failure in the aggressive monkey lab. Let’s face it, people, we are not watching Star Trek to see librarians fall in love. It’s Wagon Train to the Stars, not The Music Man.
What about the rest of the crew? The Enterprise is transporting an assortment of scholars to the space-Nobels. Spock arranges some talks and a poster session, which is dramatically cancelled when he is accused of murder. I was devastated on behalf of the Enterprise crew who were deprived of the opportunity to share their work with a broader academic community. Spock is eventually exonerated, but not until after all the networking opportunities associated with the space-Nobels have passed.
Romaine’s co-workers (the ones who aren’t threatening to strike unless she’s fired) are relieved that she’s dating Scotty, who they have never heard of (even though I’m certain that Scott has been more extensively published), instead of Kirk, who they have most definitely heard of.
Should you read this?
Oh yes.
Star Trek novels that refer to other Star Trek novels are my crack. I would love Memory Prime for that alone. It’s not a perfect novel. It contains at least four substantial novels’ worth of plot. Selecting and tracking the most important story details feels like navigating an unmarked Choose Your Own Adventure novel. It can be overwhelming at times, but it’s also exciting. The wealth of detail here mines the potential of an unimpressive Original Series episode in the way that only Star Trek novels can.
Ellen Cheeseman-Meyer teaches history and reads a lot.
“Atypically for Star Trek novels, Memory Prime treats the novels that came before it as canon.”
This had actually been building up in the Pocket novel line for several years before Memory Prime came out. It was piecemeal at first, with authors initially only referencing their own earlier novels, but eventually you started to see crossover references, encouraged by the editorial policy of the time. Two consecutive 1985 novels referenced Vonda McIntyre’s 1981 The Entropy Effect: Janet Kagan’s Uhura’s Song from 1985 referenced a felinoid character from that book’s version of the Enterprise crew, and Laurence Yep’s Shadow Lord referenced the backstory that McIntyre had given Sulu (as well as the first name she’d given him, Hikaru). Later in ’85, Dwellers in the Crucible by Margaret Wander Bonanno referenced both John M. Ford’s Klingons and Diane Duane’s Romulans/Rihannsu. Gene DeWeese’s Chain of Attack from 1987 was a very, very tenuous sequel to 1982’s The Abode of Life by Lee Correy (G. Harry Stine), and it incorporated security chief Ingrit Tomson from J.M. Dillard’s novels. The book that really solidified the ’80s novel continuity, such as it was, came out six months before Memory Prime. That was Time for Yesterday by A.C. Crispin, which was not only a sequel to her seminal Yesterday’s Son but contained references to the Trek novels of McIntyre, Duane, Ford, Brad Ferguson, Jean Lorrah, and Howard Weinstein.
So the Reeves-Stevenses weren’t doing anything new — they were simply working within the approach that was already preferred by the novel line’s editors at the time. For more discussion of the matter, see this TrekBBS thread, in which I and others tried to assemble a list of the books that fell into the ’80s continuity.
As it happens, the writing was already on the wall for that continuity when Memory Prime came out, because Gene Roddenberry and his assistant Richard Arnold were troubled by the confusion some fans displayed over the inconsistencies between the novels and the Next Generation continuity. So Arnold was put in charge of overseeing the tie-ins, and by around 1990 he’d imposed a rigid policy that forbade the novels and comics from having any original continuing characters or story threads of their own. Even though Arnold lost his job as soon as Roddenberry passed away in 1991, his restrictive policy continued to hold for most of the decade, and the books were strictly standalone adventures. But that began to erode in the late ’90s with the emergence of Peter David’s New Frontier, crossover miniseries like Invasion, and so forth. By 2000, Pocket had an ongoing, consistent novel continuity that is still going strong today.
Anyway, I like Memory Prime. It’s a rather idiosyncratic take on the Trek universe, with technology far beyond anything ever established onscreen — for instance, it features multiple sentient AIs working for Memory Prime, but TNG treats sentient AI as something almost vanishingly rare and little understood a century later. But that was part of the fun of the older novels — so much less had been defined about the Trek universe, so the novelists were free to fill in the blanks with their own imagination, and that meant their versions of the universe tended to be more idiosyncratic, more in keeping with their own personal styles and visions. Vonda McIntyre’s Trek universe was distinct from Diane Duane’s, which was distinct from Joe Haldeman’s, etc. And the Reeves-Stevenses brought a nifty hard-SF sensibility and a wild imagination to the table.
(Also, this seems to be the only book where the authors were billed as “Gar and Judith” rather than “Judith and Garfield.”)
I like “The Lights of Zetar”. When I was eleven years old and started watching Star Trek, Mira Romaine was a great character to identify with (young woman, first space trip).
Who is the guy behind Spock on the book cover? And wow, Spock has a torn shirt.
I’m so happy you’re reviewing old Star Trek novels again. My local used book store has made a small fortune selling TOS novels because of your reviews.
I hope we’ll see more soon!
@2 – I believe that the guy behind Spock is a disgruntled archivist. The archivists work with the sentient computers/artificial intelligences that sift the data in the archives. They have some cybernetic implants. I do not recall any archivists threatening to fry Spock’s head in the novel. But it’s been over a week since I read it and it’s pretty jam-packed, so I can’t swear it never happened.
Also, I agree with you about Mira Romaine – she was not my problem with the episode. And I will never criticize the preferences a person forms at age 11.
@3 – Thank you! I have some plans.
@1 – I couldn’t find anything else where they were billed as “Judith and Gar” either. I decided it was because of space limitations on the spine of the book. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I feel really weird about calling Mr. Reeves-Stevens “Gar.”
@4/EllenMCM: Speaking of space limitations, that’s reportedly the reason why Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch used the pseudonym “Sandy Schofield” on their first Star Trek novel (Deep Space Nine #4: The Big Game). Apparently they subsequently discovered it wasn’t an issue, because their full 7-word byline appeared on every other Trek book they did.
What a great surprise to see a review of our first novel collaboration! Mentioning the cover is fun, too, because it underwent an interesting change between the solicitation cover given to the sales reps a few months before the book was printed, and the final cover that the book shipped with. The first cover had Spock looking a touch, shall we say, undignified, with his mouth hanging open after his encounter with Garold, the “shocking” tech standing behind him, who’s actually a good guy in the story. (We tweeted an image of the two covers today if you’d like to check them out on Twitter – @ReevesStevens.) As for our names appearing as “Gar and Judith,” apparently that’s because that’s how we signed our notes and letters in the long ago pre-email before-time, so that’s what our consistency-minded editor put on the cover. We pointed out the mix-up when we saw the solicitation cover, and were told it would be fixed – and someday we’re sure it will be! At least our names are spelled correctly – which is more than we can say about the advance reading copies for our latest novel, WRAITH, coming in April. According to the running head on every even-numbered page that book was written by “GARGIELD and JUDITH.” Oops. As for calling “Mr. Reeves-Stevens” “Gar,” please go right ahead – that’s the real-world name he goes by, and not just on International Talk Like a Pirate Day! J&G
@6 – Thank you so much for sharing that!
One trusts that, on International Talk Like a Pirate Day (Sept. 19), Mr. Reeves-Stevens is called “Yaaar!-field”.
One piece of trivia no one has mentioned, “The Lights of Zetar” was co written by Shari Lewis of Lambchop fame. I think there was rumor she wanted to play Mira.
Ooh; I’ll have to check this one out. The Reeves-Stevenses wrote Prime Directive, my absolute favourite Star Trek novel.
It turns out the Romulan ninja assassins are nihilists.
In before obligatory Big Lebowski joke?
@4/EllenMCM: Thanks for the information!
I read this book many years ago, but I didn’t remember that it was so weird. Archivists with implants and Romulan ninja assassins! One of these days I have to re-read it.
Nice, I come here for Star Trek, and find an ITLAPD reference too.
I have this book along with all my other Star Trek tie-in fiction in my room at my mother’s house. I haven’t read it since about 1990 but, it was one of the books I read more than once. At this point I just remember thinking it was awesome to see libraries of the future and that Scotty’s love life is sad. The cover is astonishing. I didn’t realize this was the Reeve-Stevens first book. I know when I see there name on a Star Trek book it will be a good one and enjoyed their work on the last season of Enterprise too. Well I know what I’ll be doing over vacation this Xmas tie-in fiction marathon.
Memory Prime is the first Star Trek novel I ever read, and I still have fond memories of it, so I’m always happy to see it get some new attention.